Known in the industry are a few drivers for light emitting diodes (“LEDs”), like charge pumps with the multi-output current mirror from National Semiconductor. These drivers cannot economically boost input voltage more than 1.5 to 2 times and therefore do require parallel circuits for identical drive of multiple LEDs. That makes these drivers large and expensive. Also, required in this case, is a linear current regulator in each channel which compromises the efficiency of an LED driver.
It is also known an inductor based boost converter, like LT 1932 from Linear Technology™ or NTC5006 from On-Semiconductor™. Mostly used topology is a current mode regulator with the ramp compensation of PWM circuit. Current mode regulator requires relatively many functional circuits and still exhibit stability problems when it is used in the continuous current mode with the duty ratio over 50%. As an attempt to solve these problems the designers introduced constant off time boost converter or hysteric pulse train booster. While they addressed problems of the stability, hysteretic pulse train converters exhibit difficulties to meet EMC and high efficiency requirements.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,515,434 B1 and 6,747,420 provide some solutions outside original power converter stages, focusing on additional feedbacks and circuits, which eventually make the driver even larger.
It is an object of this invention to overcome the problems listed above by introducing a process and system for controlling a switching power converter, constructed and arranged for supplying power to one or plurality of LEDs to reduce the size and cost of LED driver. It also would be desirable to propose a controller, which is stable regardless of the current through LED. Another object of the invention is to create a high efficiency LED driver with a reliable protection of driver components and input battery from discharging at the damaged output.